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Do you ever have documents, presentations or other business files that are too large to send by email? Wish you had a convenient online location to store and share the most current version your documents?

Then you might want to create some FTP Dropboxes.

An FTP Dropbox is a password-protected area of your Web Hosting space that you can access with an FTP program such as FileZilla or SmartFTP.

FTP Dropboxes make it easy to share files with colleagues, partners, and clients on the Internet.

With EarthLink Web Hosting services you can have as many FTP Dropboxes as you have mailboxes on your Web Hosting or Ecommerce Hosting account, from 100 – 1,000 depending on your plan.

Note: Any FTP Dropbox you create is associated with an email address/box and the dropbox will share the same email password. But your dropboxes do not use your mailbox space – they share your Web site’s disk space allowance.

How to Create an FTP Dropbox

Sign in to your EarthLink Web Hosting Control Center https://control.earthlink.net/ at control.earthlink.net with your domain name, username and password.

Click on the Email tab.

If you want to create a new email mailbox and FTP dropbox together in one step, click the Add Mailbox button.

Enter the email address you want for the mailbox, create and confirm a password, check Add an FTP Dropbox to this mailbox, and click the Save button.

If you’ve already created a mailbox and you want to add an FTP Dropbox, click the Edit account icon (looks like paper and pencil) under Accounts on the left side of the Email page.

At the bottom of the new Edit Mailbox page, under FTP Dropbox: Disabled, click the Enable button.

Warnings: Before you share an FTP Dropbox, remember that the password for the FTP Dropbox is the same as its corresponding mailbox. Anyone with access to the dropbox has access to the mailbox and its contents.

Accessing Your FTP Dropbox

After you’ve created your dropbox, you will use an FTP program such as SmartFTP, FireFTP or FileZilla to access it.

Open the FTP program installed on your computer, and enter the FTP Dropbox Settings listed on the Account tab of your Control Center, under Client Settings (on the left side of the page). Your settings will look like this (substitute your domain name for your-domain.com and your mailbox name for mailbox):

FTP server: ftp.your-domain.com

Username: mailbox@your-domain.com

Password: your mailbox password

You can also use a Web browser, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome to access an FTP Dropbox via a special URL:

ftp://mailboxname.yourdomain.com@ftp.yourdomain.com

Note that the first part of this URL is your mailbox email address with a period instead of an @ sign. When you visit this URL in a Web browser, your Web browser will ask you for your mailbox password.

Disabling a Dropbox

Keep in mind that when you disable an FTP Dropbox, you are not deleting the files in the box. You are merely disabling access to the dropbox. To delete the contents of a dropbox you must sign in to your domain via FTP (or by using the File Manager) and delete them from the /dropbox/mailboxname directory. When you sign in via FTP, the /dropbox directory will normally be one level up. To get there, click Parent Directory in your FTP program.

Focusing on real customer needs and desires is a proven strategy for business success. But how can you be sure you know what your customers want?

Just ask them. With an online customer survey.

EarthLink Web Hosting can help – with an easy-to-use Customer Survey tool built into our Web Hosting Control Center.

We’ll show you how to create a new survey with our survey templates, how to customize your survey, how to manage your surveys and how to generate reports with survey results.

How to Create and Customize a Customer Survey

Sign in to your EarthLink Web Hosting Control Center https://control.earthlink.net/ at control.earthlink.net with your domain name, username and password.

From the Build tab, click the Customer Survey icon.

Click Create New Survey.

Type the name of your survey in the first text box (this name is for your use and isn’t customer-facing).

Select a survey template from the drop-down menu.

Enter a survey title in the text box. This is the text customers will see on top of your survey.

Enter some text to describe the purpose of your survey in the Introduction text box. Your survey description will appear below the survey title.

Enter a privacy statement or other comments. This text will appear below the last question in the survey.

Click Next to proceed to the next step, which lets you customize your survey template and add your own questions and the types of answers you want to allow.

Click where it says Type your question and then click the Edit question icon (looks like blue gears).

Type your first survey question into the top text box.

Select the type of answer you want: checkbox (lets users pick multiple answers), radio button (allows only one answer), text area or text field.

Enter a possible answer and click the Add answer button. Repeat for as many possible answers you want to display.

Click Accept when you have finished adding answers for this question.

To add another question either below or above the one you just created, click one of the two buttons to the right of the Edit question button: one has a capital Q with a + sign below the Q and the other has a capital Q with a + sign above the Q.

Repeat the process of editing the question and providing possible answers as you did above in steps 10 – 14.

Repeat the process of adding additional questions until you have completed your survey.

Click the Next button to save your survey.

After your survey is saved, you’ll have the option to create another survey, go to reports, or manage your survey.

If you want to edit and/or publish the survey you just created, click the Manage Surveys link. This will bring you to a page listing all of your surveys.

Click on the survey you’d like to publish, download, email, copy or delete. You’ll see icons on the right side of the page that correspond with these actions. Hover your mouse over any icon to see what it’s for. The first icon for the survey you just worked on should say Draft.

Click the second icon, a green circle with a triangle on it, to publish your survey.

You should get a confirmation that the survey was published along with the URL for the survey. Click OK to close the confirmation window.

If you want to edit any of your surveys, click on the survey name and then click the Next button. Make any edits you have on the Survey Properties page and click Next again. Click on any of the questions you wish to edit and click the Edit question icon. Click Next when you are done editing the questions and/or answers.

After you’ve had a survey up for a while, you’ll want to view the results. When you’re ready to do that, click the Reports tab or Reports link on the Main Menu of the Customer Survey page.

Select a survey from the list of available surveys.

Click Next.

A new page will show you how customers answered your questions.

Click Next to get additional statistics until you reach the confirmation page at the end of the report.

Good luck with your surveys. Let us know how it works for you by leaving a comment below.

If you’re an EarthLink Web Hosting customer, it’s simple with the Coppermine Photo Gallery. Coppermine is integrated into your Web Hosting Control Center, which makes it easy to use with your EarthLink-hosted website.

Fill in any required fields listed under Application Configuration (Database user and Database Name may be filled in already), enter your Administrator details, and select a directory for installation or create a new directory then click the bottom button to install Coppermine.

After the installation finishes, click the Go to Coppermine Gallery link to open your new gallery page in a new browser window and get started customizing it.

Click the Config button to get access to all your photo gallery settings and preferences. You’ll want to adjust many of these before you start uploading pictures. You can add a gallery name and description, change the gallery theme, define the width of the main table for your images, choose the number of albums to display and the number of columns for the album list, set the size of thumbnails (in pixels), choose to show a caption below thumbnails, set the maximum length for an image description, choose to create intermediate pictures and set how big they should be, specify allowed file types, and much more.

Click the Categories button to set up categories for your photo albums.

Click the Albums button to create Albums within your categories.

Click Groups if you want to change permissions for the default groups: Administrators (you, for now), Registered, Guests, and Banned.

Click Users to add users; at this point, you or whoever you designated as your administrator will be the only user.

Now you should be ready to add your photos. Simply click the Upload file link at the top of the gallery page. You can upload up to five photos at a time. Click the Choose File button to find photos on your computer to upload. Or enter the full URL pointing to an image online that you wish to use. Click Continue when you have selected all the images.

You should now see a confirmation that files were uploaded. Click Continue to add those files to the albums you have created. Use the menu to choose an album name, then title the file/photo, enter a description, and choose keywords. Click continue until you’ve done this for all files you are uploading. Click the Upload file link again if you need to upload more photos.

When you are logged in as an administrator, you can click on any of the photos to crop or rotate them, edit the file information (change the title, change or add a description, add keywords, delete comments, etc.), or delete the files. Other visitors can click on images to rate them.

There are many, many ways to customize and modify your website photo gallery over time, but the instructions above should point you in the right direction. Good luck.

Whether you have a large, multi-location business, a small local retail store, or you’re an individual service provider like a lawyer or accountant, you should at least be experimenting with social media.

Social media can be a great way for all kinds of businesses to connect with and engage customers and potential customers, to showcase your brand (even if it’s just your personal brand), to promote loyalty, and to distribute promotions. Along with your company website, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn offer you an additional online channel promote your business. But managing your business’s social media for multiple social networks can be a lot of work to keep up with.

The good news if you’re an EarthLink Web Hosting customer is that all of our hosting and ecommerce plans include a free tool, called SocialStream, to help simplify and streamline the process of managing your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn social networks from one easy-to-use social media dashboard.

Click the Connect button for each of the social networks you want to connect to your web hosting account (you will need to have signed up for the social networks first). If you ever want to disconnect a network, simply come back to this page and click Disconnect.

A new window will pop up for each network you select, asking you to allow Social Media Tracker to access your account. Click Authorize or Okay. (You may also need to sign in at the same time if you are not already signed in to the service.)

How to Post to Multiple Social Networks

If you are already in SocialStream, click the Communicate tab at the top of the page. If not, sign back into your Web Hosting Control Center and click the SocialStream icon and then the Communicate link.

Simply enter your post in the Add New Comment box (following the appropriate limits, such as 140 characters), select which networks you want to post to (or click the Select All button to post to all of them), and click Post Status.

You will see a confirmation message indicating your post was successful.

How to Track Your Social Media Posts

After you’ve started posting to your social networks, you’ll probably want to keep track of how they are working. SocialStream makes that simple, too.

If you are already in SocialStream, click the History tab at the top of the page. If not, sign back into your Web Hosting Control Center and click the SocialStream icon and then the History link.

Click the Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook icons to see information for one network at a time or click Show All.

You’ll see Posts, No. of Replies, Likes and the Time of the post. The most recent posts are on top.

Click the Follower Posts tab to see the users who are following your posts on your social networks and any replies to your posts.

Let us know how social media working for your business by leaving a comment below. Good luck!